by Peter Watts
* * *
A reporter waylays Bob Finch in a public corridor on his way to the gift shop. She seeks a reaction in the wake of Hamilton’s demonstration. Finch considers. “We agree with the activists on one score. Orcas have their own values and their own society, and we’re morally bound to respect their choices.” He smiles faintly. “Where Ms. Hamilton and I part ways, of course, is that she never bothered to find out what those values were before leaping to defend them.”
* * *
The door opens. Finch the Savior stands in the doorway with a wooden box in one hand, a plastic bag in the other.
Doug, rising with his hopes off the couch, forgets all about the Matriarch and his ankle. “Are those my steaks?”
Finch smiles. “Mr. Largha, it takes several days to prepare the merchandise. Each sample has to be measured, weighed, and studied in accordance to our mandate of conservation through research.”
“Oh, right.” Doug nods. “I knew that.”
“The gift shop is only taking a list of names.”
“Right.”
“And unfortunately, all of today’s specimen has already been spoken for. The line-up stretches all the way back into the Amazon gallery, in fact, so I brought a couple of items which I thought might do instead,” Finch says. He holds up the bag.
“There was quite a run on these, I was lucky to get one.”
Doug squints at the label. “L’il Ahab Miniature Harpoon Kit. Rubber Tipped. Ages six and up.”
“Everyone wants to prove that they’re better shots than our guests.” Finch chuckles. “I suspect a lot of family dogs may be discomfited tonight. I thought your children might enjoy—”
“I don’t have kids,” Doug says. “But I have a dog.” He takes the package. “What else?”
Finch holds out the wooden box. “I was able to locate some nice harbor seal—”
Finch the False Prophet. Finch the Betrayer.
“Harbor seal? Harbor seal! Your gift shop is lousy with harbor seal! It was marked down! My in-laws are coming over this weekend and you want me to feed them harbor seal? Why don’t I just give them baloney sandwiches! My dog won’t eat harbor seal!”
Finch shakes his head. He seems more saddened than offended. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Mr. Largha. I’m afraid there’s nothing else we can do for you.”
Doug wobbles dangerously on his good leg. “I was injured! In your aquarium! I’ll sue!”
“If you were injured, Mr. Largha, you were injured en route from somewhere that you weren’t legally supposed to be in the first place. Now, please…” Finch opens the door a bit wider, just in case Doug hasn’t got the point.
“Not supposed to be in! That was a fire exit route! Which, by the way,” Doug’s voice is becalmed by a sudden sense of impending victory, “was improperly signed.”
Finch blinks. “Improperly—”
“You can barely see that exit sign,” Doug says. “It’s buried way down in one of those stupid orca family trees. If there was ever a fire, nobody would even find it. I mean, who stops to read award-winning educational displays when their pants are on fire?”
“Mr. Largha, the viewing gallery is solid cement on one side and a million gallons of seawater on the other. The odds of a fire are so minuscule—”
“We’ll see whether the fire marshal’s office thinks so. We’ll see whether the News at Six Consumer Advocate thinks so!” Doug triumphantly folds his arms.
There is a moment of silence. Finally, Finch sighs and closes the door. “I’m really going to have to put my foot down with the art department about that. I mean, aesthetics or no aesthetics…”
“I want my orca steaks,” Doug says.
Finch walks to the wall behind his desk. A touch on a hidden control and a section of paneling slides away. Behind it, cigar boxes sit neatly arranged on grillwork shelves, lit by the unmistakable glow of a refrigerator lightbulb.
Finch turns around, one of the boxes open in his hands. Doug falls silent, disbelieving. It’s not cigars in those boxes.
“As I said, there are no orca steaks available,” Finch begins.
“But I can offer you some beluga sushi from my private stock.”
Doug takes a hop forward. Another. It’s almost impossible to get beluga. And this isn’t the black-market, Saint-Lawrence beluga, the stuff that gives you mercury poisoning if you eat it more than twice a year. This is absolute primo Hudson Bay beluga. The only people harpooning them are a few captive Inuit on a natural habitat reserve out of Churchill, and even they only get away with it because they keep pushing the aboriginal rights angle. Nobody’s figured out Belugan yet—from what Doug’s heard, belugas are probably too stupid to even have a language—so nobody needs to cut a deal with them.
The box in Finch’s hands costs about what Doug would make in a week.
“Will this be acceptable?” Bob Finch asks politely.
Doug tries to be cool. “Well, I suppose so.”
He’s almost sure they don’t hear the squeak in his voice.
* * *
To the untrained eye, it looks like rambunctious play. In fact, the cavorting and splashing and bellyflopping is a synchronized and complex behavior. Co-operative hunting, it’s called. First reported from the Antarctic, when a pod of killer whales was seen creating a mini-tidal wave to wash a crabeater seal off an ice floe. Definite sign of intelligence, that, the first mate’s been told. He squints through his binoculars and the intermittent fog until the whales finish.
The first mate pulls open the wheelhouse hatch and climbs inside. The captain throws Dipnet into gear, singing:
And they’ll know we are sisters by our love, by our—
The mate picks up the tune and rummages in a locker, surfaces with a bottle of Crown Royal. “Good show today.” He raises the bottle in salute.
* * *
Doug Largha safely departed, Bob Finch extracts a pair of wineglasses from the shelves beneath the coffee table. He fills them from a convenient bottle of Chardonnay while Anna Marie taps a panel beside the flatscreen. The distant gurgling of Juan de Fuca fills the room once more.
Finch presents the activist with her glass. “Any problems on your end?”
Hamilton snorts, still fiddling one-handed with the controls. “You kidding? Turnover in the movement has always been high. And nobody turns down a chance to commune with the whales. It’s a real adventure for them.” The wall monitor flickers into splitscreen mode. One side still contains Juan de Fuca, newly restricted; the other shows one of the Aquarium’s backstage holding tanks. A young male orca noses along its perimeter.
Finch raises his glass: first to the matriarch on the screen—“To your delicacies.” Then to the matriarch in his office: “And to ours.” Finally, he turns to the image of the holding tank. The whale there looks back at him with eyes like big black marbles.
“Welcome to the Aquarium,” Finch says.
A signature whistle carries through the sound system. “Name is—” says the speaker. No English Equivalent, flashes the readout after a moment.
“That’s a fine name,” Finch remarks. “But why don’t we give you a special new name? I think we’ll call you—Shamu.”
“Adventure,” Shamu says. “Grandmother says this place adventure. Too small. I stay here long?”
Bob Finch glances at Anna Marie Hamilton.
Anna Marie Hamilton glances at Bob Finch.
“Not long, Grandson,” says an alien voice from the cool distant waters of Juan de Fuca. “Not long at all.”
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